Another Round on the House

With its moody skies and friendly people, Ireland conjures up plenty of travel romance, and writer Turtle Bunbury’s love of country guesthouses (“At Home in Ireland,” April 2014) made hearts soar. “I spent months in Ireland and feel I know the place pretty well, but I enjoyed learning about these country houses,” wrote subscriber Libbie Griffin of New Bern, N.C.
 “The best discovery was that staying at them isn’t as expensive as I would have thought. I’ll definitely visit one or more on my next trip to Ireland.”

 Iva Foster of Burleson, Tex., was similarly enchanted but also commented 011 the provenance of the name of Ballyvolane House in County Cork, one of the featured inns: “Mr. Bunbury says that its name means ‘place of the springing heifer’ and mentions a young cow’s ‘dutiful skip.’ I wonder, though, how Irish cattle people think of springing. In Texas, we use the term for a cow about to calve. To me, then, Ballyvolane is a particularly fertile—and therefore successful—place.”

book lust Is it possible for a traveler to love any book as much as a passport? “Around the World in 80 Books” (April 2014) proposes some worthy contenders. “I would add to your list Dark Star Safariby Paul Theroux. His saga of traveling from Cairo to Cape Town covered much of the Africa I recently visited,” wrote Joan Miller of Worthington, Ohio. “And another book that allowed me to revisit two of my favorite cities, Florence and Istanbul, was Dan Brown’s Inferno. Who cares about the story? The descriptions of place were just as fun.”

ICEBREAKER Wilderness travel often requires careful footing (as does publishing a magazine story). Sometimes literally:

Photos of teens on floating ice patches in Glacier National Park’s Iceberg Lake (“Parks and Re-Creation,” April 2014) upset John Isom of Los Banos, Calif.: “I have hiked the trail to this alpine lake many times. The icy waters are dangerous, and walking and jumping 011 icebergs is foolhardy.”